541008
research-article2014
JTRXXX10.1177/0047287514541008Journal of Travel ResearchSo et al.
Empirical Research Articles
The Role of Customer Engagement in Building Consumer Loyalty to Tourism Brands
Journal of Travel Research 1–15 © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0047287514541008 jtr.sagepub.com
Kevin Kam Fung So1, Ceridwyn King2, Beverley A. Sparks3, and Ying Wang3
Abstract Customer engagement has recently emerged in both academic literature and practitioner discussions as a brand loyalty predictor that may be superior to other traditional loyalty antecedents. However, empirical inquiry on customer engagement is relatively scarce. As tourism and hospitality firms have widely adopted customer engagement strategies for managing customer–brand relationships, further understanding of this concept is essential. Using structural equation modeling, this study investigates the linkages of customer engagement with traditional antecedents of brand loyalty. Results based on 496 hotel and airline customers suggest that customer engagement enhances customers’ service brand evaluation, brand trust, and brand loyalty. The results show that service brand loyalty can be strengthened not only through the service consumption experience but also through customer engagement beyond the service encounter. This study contributes to the literature by providing an empirical evaluation of the relationships between customer engagement and key brand loyalty development factors. Keywords customer engagement, brand loyalty, brand management, customer interaction, tourism, hospitality For many years, brand loyalty has been considered a significant indicator of marketing success of firms in many industries, including tourism and hospitality (Yoo and Bai 2012). Previous brand loyalty studies have mainly examined key marketing concepts such as service quality (e.g., Bloemer, de Ruyter, and Wetzels 1999; Hsu, Oh, and Assaf 2012; Nam, Ekinci, and Whyatt 2011), perceived value (e.g., Sirdeshmukh, Singh, and Sabol 2002; Ryu, Han, and Kim 2008; Petrick 2004), customer satisfaction (e.g., Back and Parks 2003; Li and Petrick 2008; Back and Lee 2009), and trust (e.g., Chaudhuri and Holbrook 2001; Han and Jeong 2013) as loyalty antecedents. Such determinants are often described as evaluative judgment variables (Butcher, Sparks, and O’Callaghan 2001) or service evaluation factors (Lai, Griffin, and Babin 2009) determined primarily through consumers’ evaluation of the actual service experience. While trust is considered as a relational variable (Sirdeshmukh, Singh, and Sabol 2002), the trust image of a brand is based mainly on past experiences with that brand (Delgado-Ballester and Munuera-Alemán 2001; Ravald and Gronroos 1996; Rempel, Holmes, and Zanna 1985). Thus, from a customer’s perspective, brand loyalty depends largely on the consumer’s assessment of the consumption experience with a particular brand. The significant role of the service consumption experience in establishing brand loyalty remains indisputable. However,
the rise of new media channels and the growing popularity of the Internet (Xiang et al., forthcoming) have provided tourism and hospitality firms with new opportunities to connect with their customers through interactions other than the service experience (e.g., reading newsletters, writing reviews, joining a Facebook community, or blogging). The increasing usage of smartphones (Wang, Xiang, and Fesenmaier, forthcoming) and the emergence of online social media also enable customers to interact easily with other consumers outside of actual service consumption (Verhoef, Reinartz, and Krafft 2010), thus allowing firms to encourage their customers to become effective advocates for the brand (Malthouse et al. 2013). Such beyond-purchase interactions are the behavioral manifestation of customer engagement (CE) (van Doorn et al. 2010; Verhoef, Reinartz, and Krafft 2010). 1
University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA 3 Griffith University, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia 2
Corresponding Author: Kevin Kam Fung So, School of Hotel, Restaurant, and Tourism Management, Center of Economic Excellence in Tourism and Economic Development, University of South Carolina, 701 Assembly Street, Columbia, SC 29208, USA. Email:
[email protected]
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